by Kevin Barry
‘You don’t look at it,’ she said. ‘You look through it.’
I have the photograph still and it is sacred to me. On the wooden bench between us, in the amber of a stein glass, she is reflected, with her camera raised. She is there, blurrily, and it’s just a shade, but it is all that I have left of her.
ix
The end came sharply. I woke one morning to find Silvija packing her stuff. That holdall of hers had seen plenty. I tried to sound casual but there was boy-fear in my tone.
‘So this is it?’ I croaked.
‘You knew it was coming,’ she said.
The studio had had its time, she said. She was going to stay with a girlfriend in Kreuzberg. It was time that I stood on my own two feet.
‘You need to go find your own life, Patrick,’ she said.
‘Yeah and you need to go to a fucking doctor!’
I was so angry to be cast aside and I was lost in the city without her. I became depressed. I stayed with some other people for a while, in Mitte – artists, of course – but they all by contrast with Silvija seemed to be acting parts, and I have forgotten all their names. I knew that the sweet days of the summer had passed and it was time to fly away. Reluctantly, she came to the station on the morning I was to leave for the airport. She hugged me on the platform but so awkwardly; she fled instantly from the hug. She said she would email and that I could phone but six years have passed and never once did she reply to an email, never once did she answer her phone, and after a few months, the line was dead.
Which signifies nothing, necessarily, because Silvija changed phones all the time. And anyway I must believe that she is out there, somewhere among the dreaming cities of Europe, maybe in Trieste, or in Zagreb, or in Belgrade again. I must believe that she is out there, still beautiful, foul-mouthed and inviolate.
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Copyright © Kevin Barry 2012
Kevin Barry has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Portions of this work have appeared in the following:
‘Fjord of Killary’ appeared in the New Yorker; ‘Beer Trip to Llandudno’ appeared in New Irish Short Stories (Faber & Faber); ‘Ernestine and Kit’ appeared in Columbia; ‘Doctor Sot’ appeared in Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press); ‘The Girls and the Dogs’ appeared in Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press); ‘White Hitachi’ appeared in the John McGahen Yearbook, vol. 2 (National University of Ireland, Galway)
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Jonathan Cape
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224090582
